An anonymous reader writes: Yesterday, Apple placated investors when it announced plans to initiate a quarterly dividend along with a stock repurchasing program. During the ensuing conference call, Tim Cook was asked about the success of Apple's new iPad. Cook cryptically explained that the new iPad "experienced a record weekend."

A few hours later, Apple issued a press release announcing that during the first 4 days of availability, over 3 million new iPads were sold. By way of contrast, it took the original iPad 28 days to reach the 1 million sales mark.

Andrew Smith writes: "My search for an alternative to the iPhone has been long and frustrating. On paper, the HTC Desire is the first serious challenger to the iPhone's reign as king of phones. But how does it compare in use? There is much good and much bad. (This review is primarily for UK readers as HTC's new handset, the Incredible, will not be available here.)"

greymond writes: Will the iPad finally be the product that brings the era of digital books or will PDF’s and ePub’s continue to remain a niche market? It would seem to me that with the release of Sony’s reader, Amazon’s Kindle DX and now the popular iPad that we’d start to see an increase in sale of digital books. However, does anyone have numbers that can confirm or deny this?

CWmike writes: Gizmodo, which posted photos on Monday of what it said was the next-generation iPhone, paid $5,000 for access to the smartphone, said Nick Denton, head of Gawker Media, which publishes the blog. 'Does Gizmodo pay for exclusives? Too right!' Denton tweeted. Just before 6:30 p.m. Eastern, Denton posted another tweet that reinforced his lost, not stolen- contention. "iPhone update. We think we've identified the sorry Apple engineer who left the next-gen phone at the bar," he wrote. Apple's attorneys have not contacted Gawker Media, Denton added. 'No official communication, no,' he said, leaving open the door to some other form of contact. Denton didn't express any concern about what steps, if any, Apple might take, and cited a January 2008 lawsuit by the Church of Scientology and actor Tom Cruise against Gawker for posting video clips of a 'private [Church of Scientology International] religious event.' Denton said on Monday when asked Gawker's plans if it was faced with legal threats from Apple: 'Formidable though Steve Jobs may be, the Church of Scientology has a more vicious reputation for litigation.'

ocean_soul writes: "More than three weeks after the release of The Settlers 7, with the controversial "always on-line" DRM, a lot of people still can't connect to Ubisoft's DRM servers. The forumthreads where people can post if they are unable to connect keeps growing daily. The reason for the lack of fixes or responses from support seems to be that the people responsible were on vacation during the Easter holiday, despite the promis of 24/7 monitoring of the servers. The moral of this story seems to be that it is a bad idea to buy a game just before a major holiday. Something to keep in mind for Christmas shopping..."

Dave Knott writes: "The international launch of the iPad has been delayed until late May, a one month setback from the original launch window of late April. Citing Apple's press release: "Although we have delivered more than 500,000 iPads during its first week, demand is far higher than we predicted and will likely continue to exceed our supply over the next several weeks as more people see and touch an iPad. We have also taken a large number of pre-orders for iPad 3G models for delivery by the end of April." International pricing will be announced on May 10, at which time international pre-orders are expected to begin."

suraj.sun writes: Texas based company RipCode has announced a new "clientless Flash video codec" that will allow Flash content to be streamed on Apple's iPad. This would include sites like Hulu and YouTube, assuming the respective companies don't find a way to block it.

According to RipCode's press release, the TransAct Transcoder V6, as it's being called, captures the iPad's request for Flash content and converts it into a special format that the device accepts and plays. This is all done without a local client or user intervention.

"RipCode's Transactional Transcoding platform enables an alternate and immediate solution to this issue, opening up video content to users without requiring the content hoster to move to HTML5 or pre-transcode entire video libraries from Flash to an iPad-accepted container format. By transcoding the content 'in the cloud', it is essentially analogous to a network-based Flash to MP4 or MPEG-TS video adaption layer."

bl8n8r writes: No fix in the near future for java as Oracle decices a remote code execution exploit is a low-priority fix (wonder what a high priority one is..). Malicious websites can pass parameters to various java components to execute code client-side. Security researcher Tavis Ormandy said he alerted Oracle's java division to the threat but "they informed me they do not consider this vulnerability to be of high enough priority to break their quarterly patch cycle". And no, the exploit is not just limited to windows.

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Trade Representative issued a release
just prior to the launch of the New Zealand round of
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations
that has left no doubt that the U.S. is the biggest barrier to official
release of the ACTA text. Unlike most other ACTA countries
that have called for transparency without condition, the U.S. has set
conditions that effectively seeks to trade its willingness to
release
the text for gains on the substance of the text.

Anarki2004 writes: There is yet another ban that nobody asked for being proposed in several states currently. From the article: There is debate about whether or not the FDA has jurisdiction over e-cigarettes. There's a bill currently in Congress that would further complicate that debate. The Family Smoking Prevention And Tobacco Control Act was passed by the House on April 2nd, and is now in the Senate. One of its provisions would allow the FDA "to review and consider the evidence for additional indications for nicotine replacement products." That could be interpreted to allow e-cigarettes to fall under the FDA's jurisdiction.

As a former smoker and an extremely satisfied user of electronic personal vaporizers, this ban would force me and thousands of others to either switch back to analog cigarettes, or give up nicotine all together (which as any smoker/former smoker knows is not an easy task). The only people who will benefit from this law are pharmaceutical companies peddling smoking cessation products, and the tobacco industry. This proposed ban does absolutely nothing to benefit the citizens.

daria42 writes: Wikipedia's great for some things — like looking up the in-depth history of 4chan, for example — but not great for others, such as finding out the micro-history of the technology sector in certain countries. That's why Australian technology publication Delimiter has launched a public Wiki site purely focused on the Australian technology sector — its personalities, issues, companies and events. Already the site has better coverage of some areas than Wikipedia, leading to the question of whether more such small Wikis should be created for certain verticals.

pyrosine writes: I've been thinking about this for a while and have had no idea where to start.I have little or no previous experience in electronics — just what is covered in GCSE physics (wiring a plug and resistors — not much, I know).The majority of my interest lies in the wireless communication side of the field — ie ham radios and CB — but I am also interested in how many things work, one example being speakers, simply to better understand it.I would preferably like to start through some form of practical guide rather than learn the theory first but just what I would search for such a walkthrough deludes me.

Dotnaught writes: Greg Slepak, founder of software company Tao Effect, wrote Apple CEO Steve Jobs to complain about Apple's mandate that iPhone applications be originally written in C/C++/Objective-C. Job's response was to endorse a post by John Gruber on the Daring Fireball blog. Jobs called it "very insightful," suggesting Gruber's prediction that third-party iPhone development tools are out might be right. Jobs sent a second reply that also doesn't bode well for third-party iPhone development tools: "We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform."